Common Questions Asked About TV-Top Games
- What Do I Do if I Encounter a Bug?
- I’m a Game Developer/Creator. Can I Submit My Board Game to Your Site?
- Is My Payment Information Safe?
How Do I Cast the Board to My TV?
There are a few different ways you can cast the game board to your TV when playing TV-Top Games.
Option 1: Chromecast
The easiest way to share the board to a smart TV or set-top-box is to use Chromecast. Chromecast comes built into select models by Vizio, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, Philips, Polaroid, Skyworth, Soniq and more. If you don't have one of those TVs, many set-top-boxes have Chromecast as an option, specifically the Chromecast, Chromecast Ultra, Chromecast with Google TV and the Nvidia Shield TV.
If you have a Chromecast receiver device and an Android phone, casting is easy. Just make sure you're using the Chrome browser and click the cast icon.
If you don't have an Android phone but have a computer or Chromebook, you can still cast to your display by pulling up the game session in the chrome browser, clicking the settings button in the top-right corner and finding the cast option.
Option 2: TV Web Browser
Many smart TVs that don't have Chromecast built in at least have a web browser. You can manually navigate to the board game session using the web browser on your TV to show everyone what's on the board.
For the best experience, add ?castDevice to the end of your URL to tell the TV you only want to observe the board.
Option 3: Computer
When you don't have a Chromecast TV and your smart TV doesn't have a browser, sometimes the only option is to use a computer. This is still a great experience, if a little tedious to set up.
Either plug a laptop or desktop computer into a large monitor or TV so that everyone can see, or simply set a laptop or tablet on the table people are playing at. Then navigate to your board game session on any supported browser.
How Do I Cast TV-Top Games if I Have an iPhone?
You currently cannot cast from an iPhone. This is a limitation Apple has put on web apps that access the Chromecast API. However, we are working on an iPhone app that will allow you to cast from your phone. We expect the iPhone app to be released very soon.
What Do I Do if I Encounter a Bug?
We work very hard to make sure your gaming experience is as good as possible when you're playing a TV-Top Game. That said, it is possible for you to encounter a bug, and if you do, we want to make sure you're back up and playing as soon as possible.
The first thing to do, if something seems weird, is to simply refresh your browser. In our play-testing sessions that fixed most of our problems.
If the bug persists, try connecting with a different browser. We've tried to make the play experience equivalent in all modern browsers, but if you're using a particularly old browser or one we haven't come across, we can't guarantee it will work flawlessly. You'll generally get the best experience in Chrome, Edge or Firefox.
If the worst happens, and you cannot continue with the game, you may have to create a new game session and start from the beginning. In our experience this is very rare, and if it does happen, it would be very helpful if you reach out to us and tell us about your experience.
You can email us at contact@tvtop.games.
I’m a Game Developer/Creator. Can I Submit My Board Game to Your Site?
One of our goals is to allow game developers and creators to build out their own games and offer them on our platform. We will need to review the game idea and games that are submitted, but we want to help push the industry forward with this new way of playing board games and help game developers find success with their game ideas.
In some cases, we can also help develop the games for you if you have a board game you want to have on our platform but do not have the resources, time or know-how to develop it yourself!
If you are interested in either of these options, please reach out to us at contact@tvtop.games with your game idea. We’d love to chat and see if it’s something we can offer on our platform.
Is My Payment Information Safe?
Our payment platform is proudly powered by Stripe. We never store, or even see, your payment information. Our site is set up with an iframe directly to Stripe servers and all information is transferred over a securely encrypted SSL connection. Stripe guarantees the transaction meaning your data is safe and secure.
When we store your payment information for future transactions, all we're really doing is storing a reference to Stripe's database. All payments must be authenticated by them. That means that, even if our database were hacked, your payment information could never fall into the wrong hands, because we don't have it.
We take security very seriously at TV-Top Games, which is why we didn't build out the entire infrastructure from the ground up. We use trusted third parties like Google to host our database and Stripe to handle payment transactions. That makes us, and hopefully you, feel much better about our security. And it allows us to focus on what we do best, making web games.